Make America Healthy Again

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Conspiruality 327, AOC meets MAHA.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been meeting with MAHA activists in an attempt to bring the coalition to the Democratic Party.

Recent reporting reveals that she's been meeting or trying to meet with some close to RFK Jr., as well as those who have been critical of the HHS secretary.

It might be a sound political strategy, but what happens when you start courting conspiracy theorists? Derek looks into that in segment one.

Then I'll look at where MAHA currently is in segment two based on two recent Kennedy appearances.

Matthew returns to AOC in segment three to ask how the DSA might assess her MAHA pivot.

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Tonight's source code is $4 million, as in $4 million, which is how much the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., accepted in book advances over the last year.

According to the New York Times, the advances were for two books set to be published by a company that is owned by Kennedy's longtime friend and business associate, Tony Lyons, who is also affiliated with various groups that are working to advance the Make America Healthy Again agenda.

Ethics experts have warned that financial relationships like that one could potentially violate federal rules that bar officials from profiting off of their government position.

When asked about this, a spokeswoman for HHS said, quote, She added, the secretary works with HHS career ethics officials to ensure that his financial interests, gifts, outside activities, and other reportable matters are appropriately disclosed and handled consistent with those requirements.

Thank you for having me.

I've developed a theory that I want to hear your take on, and it's that the Make America Healthy Again movement, or MAHA as we call it, may end up being one of the most consequential and long-lasting things about Trump's presidency, like way more than people typically give it credit for.

You've covered this movement super closely.

What do you think?

That's Ruby Cramer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, who recently wrote a piece about a family dispute over vaccinations after the parents' children appeared to contract measles.

Right now, we're living through the largest measles outbreaks in the US in roughly 30 years.

It comes amid plummeting vaccination rates and growing distrust of vaccines and the medical establishment more broadly, ideas that have become increasingly woven into the political and social fabric of American life during Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s tenure as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and alongside the broader rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement.

I wanted to talk with Ruby about how Trump and RFK Jr. are responding to the current measles outbreak, and the roles their policies have played in it, why the world of MAHA and vaccine skepticism has become so appealing to so many people, and how these beliefs can strain relationships when parents have to make increasingly consequential health decisions for their children.

And people love talking about this.

RFK, the Maha Make America Healthy Again movement have called this out as an effective, potentially, treatment for very serious treatment-resistant depression.

So these are patients that really can't function at all.

And they've now had clinical trials actually in the UK, in the Maldives, in South London, if anyone knows that.

Uh-huh.

And he promises to MAHA, Make America Healthy Again.

Mm-hmm.

And so this, I, I'm encouraged by what they're saying.

So it's like we've got these public health academics going back decades that have these solutions and again the consensus based solutions that they've talked about and like I don't know talked about for too long almost that could be implemented.

This lot of solutions, though, in particular, do signal to the, like, Make America Healthy Again movement and do signal to some of those kind of crunchier parts of the population.

It's

funny with Make America Healthy, you know, obviously it comes with a lot of baggage, RFK, the anti-vaccine stuff, but so much of that stuff is, you know, the stuff that experts have been recommending on RNZ for 10 or 20 years.

Yeah.

It kills me with names like Children's Health Defense and even Make America Healthy Again.

Like, I want to make America healthy.

I want to ensure that people have good health and that they're living their happiest, healthiest, longest lives.

And so, but it's strategic, right? There's intention behind the selection of those words because it sounds altruistic.

And so I do worry, though, that the richness of that data is not going to be as available because, like we've talked about before, so many of these systems are getting defunded and disappearing from dashboards and websites that used to be public and understandable.

Okay.

And I think this is where I historically had a lot of sympathy, not even sympathy, kind of agreement with parts of the Make America Healthy movement of a real focus on environmental toxins and, you know, pushing for, you know, cleaner air, cleaner water, cleaner food.

But we'll see how that plays out in the future there.

Now, some of you probably know that the Maha movement, Make America Healthy Again, that started with Kennedy.

And he's the figurehead of the movement.

But he's also over the Department of Health and Human Services.

But we want to help the public.

Yeah.

Well, the Maha movement, I pulled this up too, Make America Healthy Again, is a U.S. political but public health coalition focused on reforming the American food, agriculture, and health care systems to combat chronic illness.

I thought that was interesting, chronic illness.